Sid Lestz
Murrells Inlet,SC
Work Preference
Summary
Versatile Systems Administrator / Site Reliability Engineer / Cloud Operations Specialist with 9+ years of experience building, automating, and maintaining reliable, secure infrastructure across hybrid and cloud environments (On-Prem, AWS, Azure). Proven success improving uptime, deployment efficiency, and performance through automation, observability, and proactive incident management. Strong cross-functional collaborator bridging traditional system administration with modern SRE and DevOps methodologies to deliver scalable, high-availability systems.
Overview
25
25
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Senior Systems Administrator / Site Reliability Engineer
Pearson Education INC
Baltimore, MD
05.2013 - Current
- Implement and manage Cisco UCS, UCS Manager, Fabric Interconnects, blade chassis, and rack servers, Includes deploy and manage service profiles, templates, pools, and policies
- Perform firmware upgrades, patching, and manage hardware lifecycle for all server and storage
- Monitor Storage and server infrastructure for performance, capacity, and health, and troubleshoot hardware and connectivity issues.
- Collaborate with teams and manage all virtualization, SAN and network
- Collaborate with network, SAN, and virtualization teams to ensure reliable service delivery and maintain documentation.
- Minimize operational risk by establishing robust change management protocols, contributing to 40% higher system availability.
- Manage a hybrid infrastructure of 2,500+ Windows & Linux servers across multiple AWS, Azure and on-prem environments.
- Manage certificate and secret lifecycles across multi-cloud environments (Azure Key Vault and AWS Secrets Manager), ensuring robust security posture and compliance with industry standards.
- Implement patch management, backups, and DR procedures.
- Serve as escalation lead for major incidents; perform postmortems and root cause analysis to prevent recurrence.
- Collaborate with development, QA, and InfoSec teams to ensure reliability, compliance, and cost optimization.
- Design ADO workflows for repeatable, version-controlled environment builds reducing provisioning time.
- Deploy and maintained Kubernetes (EKS) clusters for microservices; implement self-healing and auto-scaling policies.
- Build CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions) to enable automated testing and zero-downtime deployments.
- Establish observability with Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic and JIRA, cutting mean time to resolution (MTTR).
Systems Administrator / Cloud Operations Engineer
Comcast
Baltimore, MD
08.2000 - 05.2013
- Managed Windows and Linux environments for enterprise clients in a 24/7 production setting.
- Storage administration for call center and back-office services.
- Migrated core applications to Cisco UCS and EMC VNX storage, cutting infrastructure costs.
- Automated maintenance and patching workflows using PowerShell and Bash scripts.
- Implemented SolarWinds monitoring for proactive alerting and performance insight.
- Improved uptime and system performance through high-availability designs and optimized load balancing.
- Conducted regular audits and user access reviews to maintain compliance and security integrity.
- Supported 600+ Windows and Linux servers for internal business and client operations.
- Managed Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, and file systems.
- Implemented user home directory file storage quotas for storage provisioning and management.
- Automated log rotation, backups, and monitoring scripts, reducing manual workload by 40%.
- Assisted with network and firewall configurations to maintain secure connectivity across environments.
Education
Some College - Information Technology, Computer Science
UMGC
College Park, MD01.2026
Skills
- On-Prem Server and Storage
- VMware
- DellEMC
- NetApp
- CiscoUCS
- Systems Administration
- Cloud Infrastructure
- Monitoring & Observability
- Incident Response
- Security & Compliance
- Reliability Engineering
- Performance Optimization
- Cross-Team SRE Collaboration
- Automation & IaC
- CI/CD Pipelines
- Cloud Platforms
- AWS
- Azure
- Storage Systems
- XtremIO
- Unity
- VNX
- Clariion
- Operating Systems
- Windows Server
- Linux
- Infrastructure as Code
- Terraform
- Containers & Orchestration
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- EKS
- AKS
- Ansible
- Monitoring & Observability Tools
- PagerDuty
- JIRA
- Prometheus
- Grafana
- Splunk
- Qualys
- Scripting Languages
- PowerShell
- Bash
- JSON
- Python
- Networking & Security
- VPNs
- Load Balancing
- Firewalls
- DNS
- TLS/SSL
- IAM Policies
- Collaboration Tools
- ADO
- Git
- Jira
- Confluence
- Remedy
- ServiceNow
- Teams
- Slack
Certification
- AWS Certified CloudOps Engineer Associate, InProgress
- AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
- Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate
- Dell Technician Certification, #136952
- CCBC - MCSE 2000, #1877067
- UMBC – Computer Certification Training Center - MCSE NT 4.0
Selected Achievements
- Led cloud migration decommissioning two datacenters, reducing infrastructure spend by 25% while improving scalability and reliability.
- Implemented patch management automation using Azure Update Manager and AWS Patch Manager and SSM documents.
- Our Team designed a multi-region AWS backup and DR solution.
- Implemented enterprise-wide change management processes, cutting downtime.
- Standardized OS images and patching workflows for cross-team consistency and security compliance.
Accomplishments
- Orchestrated multiple datacenter to cloud migrations with zero downtime and 100% data accuracy, and enhanced operational efficiency across production systems.
- Implemented patch management automation using Azure Update Manager and AWS Patch Manager and SSM documents.
- Spearheaded cross-functional teams with implementing enterprise-wide change management practices, reducing system downtime by 40%.
- Standardized OS images and patching workflows for cross-team consistency and security compliance.
Work Availability
monday
tuesday
wednesday
thursday
friday
saturday
sunday
morning
afternoon
evening
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Timeline
Senior Systems Administrator / Site Reliability Engineer
Pearson Education INC
05.2013 - Current
Systems Administrator / Cloud Operations Engineer
Comcast
08.2000 - 05.2013
Some College - Information Technology, Computer Science
UMGC